Managing E-mail and Blog Reading Time: How Do YOU Do It?

Wireless broadband access has made reaching the Internet so much easier but one of the problems, I'm finding, is that it makes reaching the Internet so much easier.

Yesterday I tried an experiment. Twice through the day, I purposely went without e-mail or blog-checking for two hours at a time. That may not seem like much to you, but I've been getting into the bad habit of checking e-mail frequently throughout the day, or taking a break "just to catch up" with blogs. With writing-related blogs, it's easy to convince myself it's work-related.

Anyway, I did make it through the two-hour stints twice, but it was way more difficult than I expected. I was horrified, in fact, to find that e-mail checking has become part of my muscle memory - I do it without thinking; it's almost become as natural a habit as eating and breathing.

I set a timer on my computer to keep myself honest. Anyway, the results were enlightening:

1. I was twice as productive (in terms of my daily wordcount, but that wasn't as surprising as #2)

2. How ingrained my email/blog-checking habits had become.

I'm going to continue doing the "two hours at a time" experiment. Maybe I'll be brave enough sometime to go to THREE hours, but first I have to retrain my muscle memory and also retrain my work contacts to accept the fact that I'm NOT in constant e-mail contact all the time. If anything urgent comes up, they can always pick up the phone.

What about the rest of you, especially those who work at home? How do you control your e-mail and blog reading time?



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